Does NREL have the plan for clean energy scaling?

I’ve begun thinking that one of the defining questions for clean energy is, “What’s the plan?” Not a company plan, but a country plan — one that realistically maps us to an economy that gets the vast majority of its energy from wind, solar, geothermal, and that has us drastically minimizing waste.

Amory Lovins has taken a shot at it in “Reinventing Fire,” which I’m working my way through at five pages a night (a comment on my lifestyle, not his writing). Other examples? Google has its “2030 plan,” Al Gore has his Energy Challenge, and two California university professors laid out their suggested “Path to Sustainable Energy by 2030.”

The most recent version of a plan for transitioning to a clean energy economy is the detailed, “Renewable Electricity Futures Study” by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). This study finds that “[r]enewable electricity generation from technologies that are commercially available today…is more than adequate to supply 80% of total U.S. electricity generation in 2050 while meeting electricity demand on an hourly basis in every region of the country… Read more